Michigan Radio News

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May 30, 2008

When I was in kindergarten, something happened that profoundly affected education in the entire nation. The Soviet Union launched a little beeping 180-pound aluminum ball called Sputnik into orbit. Kids my age were taken into the backyard, where our daddies pretended to see it in the night sky.

And that freaked America out, though nobody was using those terms quite yet. The Russians seemed to be ahead of us in science!

When we tried to launch a satellite a few weeks later, our missile blew up on the launch pad. We seemed to be technologically behind our mortal enemies! Suddenly, massive federal dollars were available for education.

That was why and how many of us were able to go to college. Within a few years we caught up with and surpassed the Russians in space. With a few decades, the Soviet Union collapsed. Today, our enemies tend to be fanatic guerrilla bands or developing nations that are fiercely anti-intellectual. We may feel threatened, but we don't feel that the Iraqi insurgents are apt to build a super bomb.

And frankly, I wonder if we might all be better off if we thought al-Qaeda was on the verge of inventing a better mousetrap. This nation devoted massive resources to education when we felt we had to, during World War II and the Cold War that followed.

That helped us evolve into the technological and cultural powerhouse we became. Today, we don?t worry about being surpassed, and as a result, we may be losing our edge.

After all, the first principle of capitalism is that competition leads to higher quality. If you are driving an American car and are happy with it, you should thank the Japanese.

Mike Flanagan is exactly right when he says that Michigan students both can, and must, perform at a higher level.

But to ask the schools to meet the new standards without giving them more resources is self-destructive. At the upper-middle-class school where my wife teaches, they've gone from a semester to a trimester system, in order to try to squeeze in more in less time.

The teachers are exhausted, and overstressed. Imagine how they are trying to enforce these standards at schools with less money.

Peter McPherson, the former president of Michigan State, once told me that the key to success is knowing who you serve and what you want to deliver. Our present education funding policy was, frankly, based not on the best needs of our students or society.

Instead, it was designed to produce property tax relief. What Michigan needs to do is figure out what we want and need to achieve in education. Then, we come up with whatever policies are needed to fund it. There was a time when America believed in its future.

If we still do, and if we want a brighter future for our kids, we need to pour whatever resources we need into education.

There's widespread agreement that Michigan needs to drastically improve education at all levels if the state is to be able to compete successfully in the future. Last year, a new set of tougher high school graduation standards went into effect. But there is still concern over the dropout problem. Mike Flanagan is state superintendent of schools; Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry spoke with him
yesterday at the Detroit Regional Chamber Mackinac Policy Conference

May 29, 2008

During the last century, Michigan grew from being a medium-sized agricultural state, about the size of Iowa, to a highly populated industrial powerhouse in less than thirty years. The reason was simple - jobs.

Hundreds of thousands of jobs, produced by a rapidly expanding automotive sector. People streamed in from all across the world. We today talk sometimes as if we had an automotive boom economy from 1905 to 1975. But in fact, that wasn't always the case at all. When the Great Depression hit, nobody was buying cars, or much else. For more than a decade, we faced a shrinking economy that in some ways was very much like the one we have now.

I was reminded of this driving up I-75 to Mackinac Island yesterday, when I passed the sign that many of us have seen at Exit 244, CCC Museum. A couple of years ago, I actually got off the freeway and went to see it. I was happy that I did.

If you aren't up on your history, the Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the most popular programs of the now-widely scorned New Deal. Hundreds of thousands of young men from unemployed families worked on conservation projects across rural America, doing everything from planting trees to building roads and walls and fences. They were paid a pittance - about $450 a month in today's money - and had to send most of it home to their families.

But I have never met a veteran of the CCC corps who didn't look back on that experience with fond nostalgia. Many said it built up their bodies and gave them the discipline they needed to succeed in later life. Even my father, who never cast a vote for a Democrat in his life, thought it was a good thing.

When I first met Keith Cooley, he was running sort of a modern, sophisticated, private sector version of the corps. It is still going strong, and is called Focus HOPE. It was formed in the aftermath of the devastating 1967 Detroit riots. The original goal was to prevent more riots. But it has gone on to become a major force in Detroit, giving job training and pride to hundreds of inner-city youth.

Everyone knows that we need to vastly increase the number of young adults with college degrees in this state. The legislature's failure to adequately fund higher education is a disgrace. But we also need to invest heavily in vocational training and retraining, for those left behind when the world changed.

And we need to train people for the sophisticated technological jobs of the future. No, socialism is not the answer for the twenty-first century economy. But neither is laissez-faire capitalism. There is a future for an unregulated, minimum wage economy, and it is called Haiti. If Michigan is to build the economy we need to compete in the future, it will take a lot of shrewd game planning and intelligently crafted public-private partnerships and strategies.

If there is something pretty much everyone at this week’s Mackinac Policy Conference agrees on, it is that Michigan needs jobs. And Keith Cooley, Director of the Department of Labor and Economic Growth, is the state’s job man. He’s also more than a typical bureaucrat; he’s a former engineer and CEO of FOCUS Hope. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him during the hubbub of the conference.

May 28, 2008

The Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce had a good idea almost thirty years ago: Invite the state’s major figures in government and business to a hold a serious policy conference on state problems away from the spotlight and all the usual hustle, stress and pressure.

And where better to do that than Mackinac Island? There, they figured, is the one place in Michigan where the high rollers would be unable to be summoned back to the office for a meeting.

There are no cars allowed on the island, and being situated in the middle of Lake Huron is something of an obstacle to a speedy exit. The conference was created, believe it or not, in a day before everyone had a cell phone tucked into their pocket.

Since then, Mackinac has evolved into a major social, political and media event, where coming to see and be seen is a major part of the program. Nevertheless, the conference does get people together who might otherwise never be in the same room.

Often, they actually get to know each other as human beings, rather than alien forces. Sometimes they even pledge to work together on goals like mass transit. Sadly, all too often, such agreements start to evaporate on the return trip, once they get south of Gaylord and longtime political realities take hold.

That has tended to be especially true in election years, and, guess what. This is an election year. Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson has spent years running for re-election, not against his Democratic opponents, but against Detroit Mayor Coleman Young and now, Kwame Kilpatrick. Not to worry -- the mayors have effectively used him as a bogeyman with their voters.

Oh well. You might also think that bringing together all these great and powerful minds in one place would create some sort of intellectual fusion that would provide powerful insights into the future.

Well, it is clear that those attending often think that is the case. Take last year’s Mackinac Conference. A panel of veteran political handicappers agreed that this year’s presidential nominees would be Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney.

That conference occurred right in the middle of the legislature’s budget wars, and concurrence on anything was hard to come by, except this: Both parties agreed that whatever replaced the Single Business Tax had to be revenue-neutral.

Eventually, they adopted a Michigan Business Tax that started out that way, but which then had a large surcharge added to it at the last moment. The first results show confusion, resentment, and a higher tax that seems to be generating less revenue than anticipated.

That doesn’t mean we ought to be cynical. This year’s conference theme is “Building a Stronger Michigan.” And we need to be in favor of anything that advances that. Still -- I wonder if the keynote speaker, Carly Fiorina, was a good symbolic choice. After all, she is best known for getting fired as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

May 27, 2008

Back in the summer of 2003, Geoffrey Fieger asked me if I wanted to meet the next President. Sounded interesting, so I went to his house and joined a small group of people talking to John Edwards. I was a trifle disappointed in Edwards.

The senator was clearly smart, but he talked mainly about how he was the only Democrat who could win, rather than what he wanted to get elected President to do. Much of the time, he and Fieger talked shop, as a couple of medical malpractice lawyers.

So, as you might expect, Fieger became a strong supporter of Edwards, whose campaign, however, flickered out before the first day of spring. Much, in fact, as the Edwards campaign did this year. But Fieger is now being charged with illegally reimbursing employees of his law firm who gave money to Edwards’ brief 2004 campaign.

The employees gave $2,000 each, then the legal maximum, and Fieger reimbursed them.

Now Fieger has, indeed, been known to skate close to the edge. He claims that he researched the law, and there was a loophole that allowed him to do this in the way that he did it -- as bonuses from which he was careful to deduct taxes.

I have no idea whether his argument holds water. However, I do know that what he did had no effect on the outcome of the election.

The total amount he is being accused of contributing illegally is $127,000. That wouldn’t even buy you an evening’s worth of prime-time TV commercials. In any event, the Edwards campaign was probably dead on arrival by the time they got the Fieger money.

This month, far more than that is being spent in the courtroom. Fieger is being charged with, among other things, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and, making illegal campaign contributions in another’s name. if convicted, he could lose his law license, have to pay a $250,000 fine, and get up to ten years on the obstruction of justice count alone. That would destroy him.

Yet our campaign finance laws are so bad that there is a way he could have spent far more, perfectly legally.

All he would have had to go is form a so-called “527" group. Such groups aren’t subject to any spending limits by the government.

That’s because they are supposed to be “issue-oriented” groups that don’t promote a particular campaign. But it would be easy to structure such a group promote a pro-Edwards message.

Guess what was the most famous 527 group in history? The misnamed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which spent $22.4 million to destroy John Kerry’s campaign. Oh, two years after the election, the group was fined $299,000 for misrepresenting itself.

But did the Department of Justice go after anyone behind the committee? Not at all. Over the Supreme Court building in Washington the words are carved: Equal Justice Under Law.

If anyone thinks what’s going on here is equal justice, they have a bigger problem than even a 527 committee can solve.

Attorney Geoffrey Fieger has been on trial for alleged federal campaign finance violations. Tomorrow, the case goes to the jury for deliberations. Whether the verdict is guilty or not-guilty, there will certainly be implications for future campaign donations. Rich Robinson is the Director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about the Fieger trial.

May 23, 2008

The environment is probably the most important and – even now - least appreciated issue there is. Matter of fact, to call the environment an issue is to diminish it. Welfare reform is an issue. Iraq is an issue. The environment is life, period.

We ought never to forget that we are living on the delicate, not very thick skin of this big ball of rock, and if we somehow mess it up too badly, everyone and everything is going to die.
Now that I’ve depressed you, the good news is that people are now far more aware of the environment than they were when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s.

But we are still not aware enough. And here’s the problem. We have lots of people who think that they are true environmentalists doing their part to save the world because they put their plastic bottles in the recycling bin. Sometimes they even remember not to put their aerosol cans in the trash.

On the other hand, many of us have encountered radical environmentalists, one of whom once told me that I was the moral equivalent of a Nazi because I had central air conditioning.

One thing you learn covering politics is that insulting people is generally not a good way to win votes. I’ve heard far too little about environmental policies from any of the presidential candidates. That’s because their advisors don’t think it wins votes.

I am very glad that Governor Jennifer Granholm cares about renewable energy. She has done us all a service in raising awareness of the potential of wind power.

But raising unrealistic hopes may actually backfire. Last week I talked to Skip Pruss, the governor’s special advisor on renewable energy. I was skeptical of the governor’s claims that our push for wind and solar power could generate 19,000 new jobs.

Pruss assured me that was a correct figure. And he said that many of these jobs would be created when Michigan’s pioneering use of wind power becomes an inspiration to other states.

Then, our idle tool-and-die shops will be called back to service making windmill parts, which other states would eagerly buy. That is a nice dream, but defies common sense.

But what really defies common sense is that energy bills now before the Michigan Senate set renewable targets – but don’t mandate compliance in any effective way.

If we really want to get serious about creating green energy jobs, we have to pass legislation that will create them. Yes, that takes political will, and the special interests will squawk. But we are living healthier lives today because of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts.

Not to mention the Environmental Protection Agency, and the much hated fuel economy standards for cars.
Eventually, if we survive as a species, we’ll stop using the term “green jobs” because all jobs will be expected to be more or less green. Sadly, that time seems still a long way away.

Move over white and blue collars… suddenly it seems like everyone is talking about “green-collar” jobs as the profession of the future. These are the jobs that some say will be both beneficial to the environment, and the state, in years to come. Barry Rabe is a professor of environmental policy at the University of Michigan. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.